A Jamaican in New York reading and wondering wha really a gwan

Regarding the New Yorker cover

Some thoughts of mine regarding the New Yorker magazine’s cover illustration this week are available at the Huffington Post.

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If you’ve ever watched tabloid daytime TV you’re probably familiar with the following set-up. On the way out to a commercial break, the producer teases the next segment with b-roll footage of a precocious and scantily-clad teenage girl. Then the show’s host does a voice-over like this: “When we come back we’ll meet Lolita, a teenage girl. She tells her mom: ‘You can’t stop me from having sex!'”

The talk-shows pretend they’re in the business of helping the girls. But it’s pretty obvious that ‘helping’ is not part of the mission. The only thing that matters to the shows is the ratings and the corresponding ad revenue. Which is exactly why these shows are willing to exploit the low-self esteem of an immature girl.

What makes the producers of such talk shows worse than the criminals and victims they report on is the cynically calculated, coldly deliberate and methodical way these producers approach these topics.

I’m reminded of this kind of tabloid talk-show cynicism by this week’s cover illustration for the New Yorker magazine with its despicable depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama. It is fairly clear by now that despite their protestations otherwise, the New Yorker designed this cover to be inflammatory and to provide grist for cable news networks so they could sell more magazines and, perhaps, attract new subscribers…..